In user interfaces (UI) of electronic devices such as computers including desktop, laptop and palmtop devices, the use of simple switches, buttons, and knobs have been superseded by keyboards, keypads, mouse controllers, speech recognition input means, touch displays and related UI means like a touchpad.
In particular, touch surfaces such as touchpads and touchscreens undoubtedly form the ‘de facto’ UI of modern smartphones, tablets and supplementary UI of many desktop computers as well. The touch displays may generally apply to a number of different technologies for implementing the touch-sensitive functionality. Among various other potential options, e.g. capacitive, resistive, infrared, optical imaging (camera-based), frustrated total internal reflection (FTIR), acoustic, and hybrid solutions are feasible.
Many electronic devices, such as smart phones, comprising a number of touch-sensitive surfaces are also capable of executing a number of other functionalities many of which can be provided through additional components arranged into the device. For example, vibration/tactile functions are often enabled by such dedicated components.
Further, in many cases it may be feasible to arrange many of the functional components of the device closer to its physical user interface, for example by at least partially embedding the components in the housing material of the device. Whether functional components are disposed within the device on circuit boards or embedded in the housing material, the plurality of available and possible components and combinations thereof is such that bringing the functionalities associated with the functional components to the advantage of the device requires often extensive configuration and integration on many levels of the device design. In later phases this approach may prove inflexible to changes in the design.
Traditionally the approach has been using dedicated controllers and drivers for the functional components or achieving the same by including the needed controllers and drivers in the host device. Depending on the number of functional components this also leads to the need to have a large number of conductors originating from the components to be connected to the host device. Additionally, the type of signals carried by these conductors can largely vary. This requires the host to either be able to process this kind of signals or the signals to be transformed to a suitable format prior to introducing them to the host.
The traditional approaches are space consuming, inflexible and expensive, which has set various limitations to the designers and manufacturers trying to produce top notch end products. Advances in functional components and materials have made it possible to design advanced device and interface concepts but previous solutions for enabling functionalities associated with these components have generally performed poorly in view of integration and sometimes also functionality.